Quote of the Day

A good or bad defense of the faith may be helpful or unhelpful, but in each case that is only corroborative.  The Christian faith is not true because someone argues for it brilliantly, nor is it false because someone defends it badly.  Christian faith is true or false regardless of anyone's defense of the faith.  Faith's certainty lies elsewhere than in the rapier sharp logic or the sledgehammer power of the apologist.  At the end of the day, full certainty comes from the conviction of the Holy Spirit.

- Os Guinness
from his book:  Fool's Talk:  Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

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(On progressive sanctification)No, indeed, dearest, I shall not tell you that having Christ, and being therefore rich in hope, you can want nothing more.  I know that when sure, quite sure of the pardon of sin, we do want more - we want to be rid of it.  Such is the beautiful design of God.  We are safe in being justified; but we are not happy, but in proportion as we are sanctified; the former satisfies our fears, but our desires are restless for the latter.  As the former is the first act of divine love, it is naturally the first thing a believer seeks to be assured of; and when he has assured himself of pardon and justification in Christ, he very often fancies for a time that he has the whole of salvation, and is sanctified.  But this does not last; he finds out as you do, that he wants more; he wants holiness and cannot be happy without it.  But then what a comfort that the one is secure as the other,  although a slower process; that the same blood which bought our justification, and bestows it at once, bought our sanctification - the other half of one and the same salvation, - and must bestow it ultimately.

Caroline [Fry] Wilson
From:  An Autobiography and Letters of the Author of The Listener, Christ Our Law, Etc. (1849)

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As to your thoughts of chastisement for past sin, I do not think we may look for it with emotions of fear.  I think the chastisements of God upon his people are prospective; retrospective never.  Do you see what I mean, dear; if I had yesterday a cankered wound in my hand, the careful surgeon may come today and cut it off.  Not because it was diseased yesterday, but that it may not be so tomorrow...Exactly in this point of view, I look upon the chastisements the believer has to anticipate.  No punishment but that which is remedial; if the sin which last year broke out into action of offence before God, be this year existing unabated in my bosom, ready to break out again, then chastisement must come;; the bitter remedy must be applied; the painful cure performed, because by any means, or all means, I must be made holy....there is no wrath in His bosom for the past: and if my view be right, I see in it no ground of depression, but rather of rejoicing, of encouragement. If we hate the sin more than its consequences, which I believe we do, we shall rather hope than fear, to see those consequences doing execution upon the sin.

Caroline [Fry] Wilson writing to a friend in 1829

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Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back.  I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back.  And then one day it struck me:  my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt.  That was really selfish of me.  It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real.  At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how  to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God.  God doesn't promise to constantly flood us with intense emotion…From the earliest days of the church, Christians have based their closeness to God on theology - on what they knew about God from Scripture - rather than feelings.  Many of the first Christians shed blood for believing in God.  If anyone had the right to feel distant from God, wouldn’t it be the people suffering for his sake? Instead, the early disciples rejoiced at the chance to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:41)."

From the book: Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity

by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold

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In the blessed Redeemer's service, not one thing is required, that is not first bestowed; not a service for which strength is not given, nor a grace tha thas not been promised.  We serve a Master, who gives us all for naught:  and we repay him only with his own.

- Caroline Fry Wilson

From the book containing her autobiography and Letters

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Faith is not inherently virtuous.  Its value depends on the worth of its object.  The Bible understood in context and given precedent over our own instincts and preferences , is our dependable guide for faith and practice.

- Randy Alcorn

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...What we see in these two incidents is that God seems relatively unconcerned with giving specific answers to the anguished questions of Habakkuk and Job.  He answers them, but not point for point.  This suggests that all our questions about God's wisdom and justice and love may not be all that important to God in the end - or at least not as important as other things.  This doesn't mean we can't ask them.  In Christ, we have the freedom to speak what's on our hearts and minds.  God isn't going to cast us from his presence because we ask him some tough questions.  It just means that we shouldn't take our questions too seriously, because apparently God doesn't take them too seriously.

It may shock us to hear it put that way.  We think pretty highly of ourselves an dour questions.  We think it's our right to ask such questions and to demand such answers, even from God.  But God does not seem to share this view.  In the Bible, whenever God is asked a question that throws into doubt his kindness or justice, he more or less refuses to answer.......As the Cross demonstrates, God takes us seriously.  he takes our sin seriously.  But he continues to show relative indifference to our questions.  He does not answer them to our intellectual satisfaction, he refuses to submit himself to our interrogations.

That's because the really important question in the Bible is not any question we ask of God but the question he asks of us.  And though it is appropriate to ponder any number of questions...our questions must always take a backseat....

- From Mark Galli's book -  God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins

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Everything we encounter today is used by God to prepare us for tomorrow. he wastes no trials, withholds no blessings, nor does he hold back  on the discipline of his soldiers.  All he does prepares us for future usefulness as vessels of honor.

- From Polycarp: a destroyer of our gods - by Rick Lambert

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Our task is not to help people see God favorably but to see him accurately.  God has the power to touch hearts and to draw people his love and grace while they fully affirm his holiness and justice...God has appointed us to faithfully deliver his message, not to compose and edit it.  He has already written the message - it's called the Bible.  Who are we to spin it and tame it , or presume to be more loving than Jesus, who with outrageous love took upon himself the horrific penalty from our sin?  God's position is already taken; we need not apply.   We do not own the Christian faith.  It isn't ours to revise.  God's Word wasn't entrusted to us so that we could give it away piece-meal, leaving the next generation with the leftovers.  If we go on decade after decade parceling out fragments of the faith, what will be left?  When we abandon truths Christians once died for, will we no longer have truths worth living for?

- Randy Alcorn
From the Forward to 'God Wins:  Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins' - by Mark Galli

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Modern liberal critics leave behind them a world of jumbled confusion.  They tell us that God has revealed Himself but refuse to pin themselves down as to exactly what that revelation is.  In fact, upon occasion, we find them glorifying the uncertainty of their preaching, because this offers them an opportunity for the exercise of 'the leap of faith.'  The basic thesis of their dialectical theology is that the acts of God in history cannot be detected apart from 'a leap of faith' and the revealed Words of God can never be identified with any words.  The avow that divine acts are beyond history and divine words are beyond language.  There is a segment of neoorthodoxy that distinguishes between God's Word and the human expression of that word.  The so-called word of God can be recognized only in the area of experience.  This would mean that not even the words of Jesus are a valid external authority.  Only those words of Jesus are valid which one feels to be appropriate to Jesus according to the judgment of one' sown mind, which seems to mean that one's own mind becomes one's own Jesus…….Thus, the entire Bible becomes a Book from which one may pick and choose what appeals to one's mind.  Experience becomes the supreme authority.  Bible teaching becomes secondary….Religious experience thus becomes an object of one's own interpretation fo truth and as such  it can prove anything….Cutting theology off from the control of the biblical text cannot do aught but lead to its death.

 

 

- W. A. Criswell

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Harmony is found in Christ-likeness not in the flaunting of our originality.  The true Christian wants to blend in amongst the (Christ-like) brethren.

- Don Lambert

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People often demand signs (from God) on their terms, ignoring the signs God chooses to give.  God builds our faith in ways that we would not have anticipated.  To insist on proofs of our own making is not beneficial. 

- paraphrase of Don Lambert

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You know whether or not you are really a servant by the way you react when you are treated like one.

George MacDonald

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That the members of every Church or Congregation should know one another so that they may perform all the duties of love one towards another both to soul and body.  Matthew 18:15.  1 Thessalonians 5:14. 1 Corinthians 12:25.  And especially the elders should know the whole flock, of which the Holy Ghost has made them overseers.  Acts 20:28. 1 Peter 5:2, 3.  and therefore a Church should not consist of such a multitude that they cannot have particular knowledge of one another.

- Part of a Baptist declaration of faith in 1611

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"What is somewhat remarkable about this vast array of gods named in the Bible is the fact that nothing is mentioned about their alleged abilities or qualities.  The Bible is purposefully silent about any description of these gods.  This is not important because the gods are in fact not a part of reality."

 

"The gods were something only in the sense that the people of God had to contend with the idea of them…The first commandment does not affirm that other gods exist even though it refers to them.  They are merely constructs of the human imagination or belong to the created order."

From: The Ten commandments:  Ethics for the Twenty-first Century by Mark Rooker

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“I recall Decimus instructing me while at work that wrong friends will make my heart yearn for sin more than it usually does. Compromises will be easier and wisdom will be replaced with folly. I just figured that they didn’t know him, and therefore were judging him. Plus, I told them that Erebus …was interested in becoming a Christian, and that was the basis of our friendship. My biggest mistake was when I told John that Jesus spent time with sinners far worse than Erebus. ‘Oh foolishness, you forget I was with Jesus when he was in the homes and company of sinners,’ John chided. ‘Jesus did not come to make friends, but to call sinners to repent. Do that long enough and let’s see how many friends you pick up…His visits were hardly a social call…He did not save any lost soul by living like that lost soul…until Erebus sees Christ in you, you are guilty of leading him astray as I’m afraid he is leading you astray...As I see it, friendships are grown when you are all going in the same direction, and can help, encourage and protect all involved. Friendships are not to be reckless, but constructive and purposeful where you are building each other up and improving each other’s character. If this isn’t that inner, guiding principle of all the friends you hold, then in what direction is it actually going, and what good will be derived from it? If friends are not making each other better, then they’re fulfilling the role of our spiritual enemy by tearing down what is good and ruining what had potential……”

- Rick Lambert
from his book-  Polycarp: A Destroyer of our gods

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True love isn't mutual, true love is selfless.

- Don Lambert

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No artistic depiction should ever be offered as a way to understand something of God's glory.  Any attempt to understand an aspect of God's glory in this way would present a false impression and a distortion.  "In a similar way, the pathos of the crucifix obscures the glory of Christ, for it hides the fact of His deity, His victory on the cross, and His present kingdom."

- From Mark Rooker's book  The Ten Commandments:  Ethics for the Twenty-First Century